Descriptions

Visual working memory (VWM) allows us temporarily hold images in our minds and manipulate them. As an example, you can remember a face you just saw, or try to imagine how a room would look with a different arrangement of furniture. Previous studies have shown that individuals with low VWM capacity (able to remember only a few visual items) are much more susceptible to distraction than high VWM individuals (e.g., Poole & Kane, 2009). Nevertheless, it is unclear whether their inability to avoid distraction occurs because their spatial attention is easily captured by distractions (the capture hypothesis) or because they have difficulty disengaging attention from distractions (the disengagement hypothesis). The present study tested between these two hypotheses.